3 Ideas For Your Next Lead Magnet (Plus a Success Checklist!)

Every Online Business Needs a Strategy To Generate Leads

Email is one of the most talked-about spaces for generating leads in digital marketing. Everyone talks about how important it is to build your subscription list, and how to best take advantage of it with the right email sequences, crafting the perfect subject line, and showing up consistently in your readers’ inbox.

But none of this matters if your list is empty.

A lead magnet is a free product businesses of all sizes offer on their website as a way to secure email addresses from potential customers.

The options are endless when it comes to lead magnets. You can make a checklist, an ebook, a design or text template, a case study (check this blog post if you want to write a great case study!), an actionable list relating to a blog post, a whitepaper, the results of a research project you conducted, prompts for social media or journaling, recipes, tutorials…

A lead magnet can be anything you can think of, relating to your area of expertise, that can be useful for potential customers.

Come Up With An Irresistible Lead Magnet To Hook Your Readers

The goal of a lead magnet should always be to add value to your customer. Not only collect their email. And to do this, your lead magnet should do four things:

Offer real solutions: Your reader is handing you their email because they trust you’re adding value to their life. If this isn’t the case, they check out. When your lead magnet doesn’t solve the problem they come to you for, you lose a follower, and probably a sale.
Be specific and quick to work with: a lead magnet is not your offer. It is a short piece of content that will provide an instant reward to your reader. A great lead magnet needs actionable steps to solve your customer’s problem and help them win something on the spot. Think of it like a scratchcard!
Be genuinely valuable: Your lead magnet is often the first impression a reader gets of your product. When you deliver a nicely designed product with high quality content to your reader, you’re building a connection with them. They start trusting that the space they offered you in their inbox is worth it because you care about them enough to make an effort to share a truly great product.
Prove your expertise: When you design a lead magnet, you need to make sure that you’re doing it in an area you’re truly great at. This way, you’re confident in providing your reader a real solution to the problem the lead magnet offers to solve. And again, you build trust: when your reader succeeds applying your method (which you gave away for free!), they see you as a trustworthy service.

3 Categories You Can Choose From to Create A Really Great Lead Magnet

1. Actionable:
If your reader is looking for a quick fix to their problem, a downloadable PDF or ebook with actionable steps is the way to go.

The goal with this type of material is to offer an instant reward to your reader when they complete the worksheet or checklist.

Some effective ideas include: A checklist, cheatsheet, templates, formulas, scripts, a toolkit, calendars, planner pages, worksheets.

2. Informational:

As a service provider, you package your knowledge and sell it as a product. For an informational lead magnet, you do the same, but you offer it as a small sample of what’s to come when your reader hires you.

This option can include things like gated content, special blog articles or essays, reports, whitepapers, tutorials, ebooks, infographics, free courses, podcast episodes, or interviews with special guests.

But keep in mind that, while this is usually the first step in a sales funnel, the goal is not to send a sales pitch. The content needs to be able to stand alone and be useful.

When your content is genuinely useful, your potential customers trust you more. Which means they’re more likely to buy from you.

3. Product based:

This type of lead magnet is common in online communities and creative industries: these could be described as a call to action because they’re products you can use directly in your own work.

This type of lead magnet can include the downloadables you receive when you sign up for a campaign.

Other options for product-based lead magnets are: Journaling or social media prompts, graphic templates, stock images, and design elements like font pairings and color palettes.

A product-based lead magnet is great because it easily gets your brand in front of a broader audience without you putting in additional effort.

A Great Lead Magnet Helps You Build Authority and Trust

Your reader came to your page because they have a problem and are looking for a solution. Once you deliver it (for free!) in their inbox, you start to build a solid relationship.

And they hire you because they trust that you can help them succeed.

Start brainstorming your next lead magnet now!

Already have a lead magnet? Check Write Emails: 4 Steps to Emails that Get Results.

Eliana Ifill,

Lead Copywriter